webkroll.com

EDIT: I have updated the script again, this time adding a timestamp to the window name in the ‘window.open’ call to avoid popups overwriting each other if multiple links are followed from a page.

Today my good friend Kay asked me if I had time to look at some nifty Javascript fellow web professional Roger Johansson had come up with to make a few modifications to suit her particular needs for a project she is currently working on.

As I am usually very curious regarding any sort of modification or enhancement of any kind of code I said I’d have a look at it.

What Roger has put together is a very well done, easy to use and accessible solution to the "popup problem" - a wild mix of inline javascript code, or onClick functions - by removing all javascript from the markup and therefore separating the presentation from the behavior layer as it should be.

The original version of Roger’s script used a ‘_blank‘ to open a new window, which is obviously sufficient but didn’t do the trick for Kay.

What Kay wanted, was a way to open popups with different dimensions via a couple of pre-defined class names (i.e. popup_small, popup_medium etc.) to get a bit more control. While we were talking about it I thought it would be even more convenient to get custom width and height values from the class names in addition to the pre-defined class names to add greater flexibility.

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So, after 10 years I have finally decided to chop my long hair off and I am actually liking the new “me”.
I was fairly keen on the idea of not having to worry about taking ages to dry my hair, it getting in the
way on a daily basis at work, training or anywhere else really.

I have to say Kay’s mom did an awesome job and I am very pleased with the result.
I think you should visit her New Look Unisex Hair Salon, or even better drop in for an awesome haircut yourself.

That’s all.

I just found this over at Ctrl-Alt-Del, and couldn’t help to post it here as well.
This must be THE most excruciating customer support phone call I have ever heard. The fact that the matter is SO SIMPLE that any middle school student would understand it after the first explanation makes it even worse.

The whole story and a transcript of the phone call is here:
http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/

90% of the audio of this call can also be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp0HyxQv97Q

Simply unbelievable.

Took a crash course in Fusebox 4 the other day and behold it only took me a few minutes to get the hang of it and after more than a day of working with it again I must say I feel right at home. I thought the major differences in the style and function of Fusebox 4 compared to version 3 would make it more difficult to get “into it” again, but I am happy to report that is not the case.

So far everything makes sense and even though things are a lot more spread out, in terms of circuits being split up into their Model/View/Controller parts, it all seems a bit “cleaner” and more flexible. All the parts I had to create so far are nothing new, and far from rocket science ™, but it was good to see it all coming together with ease.

In other related news:

Mention of Flex 2 has been floating around the WA based ColdFusion list the last few days/weeks so tonight I had a more in depth look at what Macromedia … ehh Adobe present to the developers out there. I still remember how cool Flex seemed while in closed Beta. A lot of plain cool things could be done with so much less effort than before and it all looked spiffy too. Sadly the whole licensing issue put a massive dent in everyone’s enthusiasm. Sure, Flex was aimed at a higher level market, but somehow, secretly everyone hoped for some sort of licensing deal that would enable even the mere mortal developer to use such a nice “toy”.

I don’t want to jump the gun as to what is better/worse in Flex 2 as I have literally just been trolling around their site and skimming through the various PDFs the have to offer, but I think “it doesn’t look all bad” is a fair comment at this (at least for me) early impression.

The idea behind progressive enhancement - as the name already indicates - is to step away from an ‘all or nothing’ approach for a certain technology and instead gradually enhance the website functionality by adding additional layers depending on the clients abilities to use the functionality in the new layer.

A simple breakdown of these ‘layers’ would be as follows:

1. Content
2. Semantically meaningful markup for the content - (x)HTML
3. Presentation layer - CSS
4. Behaviour layer - DOM scripting

With a progressive enhancement approach to building websites, you can ensure that not matter how advanced and code rich your website might be, the core information of the site and the way in which it is useable and accessible for your users will remain the same.

Just because someone does not have Javascript enabled does not mean he will be locked out of your site.

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